Dr. Allen David McHugh

Raised on a small dairy farm on remote King Island, Tasmania,  educated in Victoria in the Australian Army as a Mechanical Engineer and a technical support workshop leader for the Royal Australian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers in Eastern Australia for 20 Years.  I eventually arrived in SE Queensland to undertake a Bachelors Degree in Horticultural Technology and a PhD with the  University of Queensland at Gatton in the Lockyer Valley.   For my PhD, I studied regeneration of agriculture soil under a controlled traffic rainfed farming system, setting the rest of my career on a path with regenerative agriculture.   An ACIAR project under the Ag Mech team at UQ Gatton, initiated a 20-year association with rural agricultural development in western China and Asia.  Prior to leading international agricultural projects for ACIAR,  I was a project leader for the Queensland Government, researching; natural resource management, rural water use efficiency,  and applied proximal sensor development in support of their agricultural and horticultural industries'  irrigation efficiency programs.  I relocated to Ningxia Province, China, to work full time on a national program to implement Conservation Agriculture, which also led to consultancies in Iran, Egypt, UK, India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and finally a transfer to  Bangladesh to lead projects for CIMMYT.  As Chief of Party for a large USAID project, I developed scale-appropriate mechanisation and value chains for improved food security utilising conservation agriculture principles.  My technical team and I, local and international NGO partners and the private sector, built a resilient agricultural mechanisation program through a network of innovation hubs, entrepreneurial service providers and mechanisation value chain development.   This project evolved into a mechanisation extension activity, which I developed and implemented to improve machinery manufacturing, workforce growth, and agronomic development.  Currently, I am an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Agriculture Engineering, University of Southern Queensland and developing Regenerative Agriculture projects in South Asia